by CE Murphy
We died to feed an ancient power, bleak and cruel. Our spirits were meant for him, the Devourer, the Master, the End of All Time, and yet the bog took our souls as well as our skins. We were bound to this earth in a way that spirits are not meant to be, never to leave it without someone to grant us release.
Men of learning released our bodies from the soil: a brightness in our dark destiny. We have cried here for so little time compared to the years we lay beneath the bog, and now you have come to free our broken hearts. We are free, and in our freedom we may choose. We have been granted release, but we will not yet leave.
Call to us, Caitríona O’Reilly, Irish Mage, in your fateful hour, and we will come.
The light, the faces, the magic, faded as quickly as it had come. Cat’s knees went wobbly and she leaned her weight on the spear, suddenly knackered. The museum visitors were full of shouts and gasps and questions, their voices echoing off the walls like a band of hooligans determined to make all the noise in the world. She felt her circles unraveling beneath their feet, swift sparks of power zipping toward her as the unwinding touched them, as if each touch lent her half a breath of strength. Her shields, the daft Star Trek shields that Joanne had taught her to protect herself with, felt stronger as the last circle came undone, until she was herself again among the bog men and the tourists.
The mummies looked no different than before, but their cries were silenced. Their pain was gone, the suffering ended, though a sense of their presence remained. There to come to her when she called at her fateful hour, which sounded dangerous enough indeed.
A yowl broke through the thought and the boy she’d seen before appeared, a splinter embedded under his fingernail. “I wasn’t supposed to touch it!” he wailed. “Mommy’s going to k-ki-kiiiillll me!”
Caitríona laughed and crouched. “Let’s see it, lad. Ootch, that looks like it hurts. It’s American you are?”
“Y-ye-yeees. How’d you k-k-knoooow?”
“Ah, you’re no Irishman, not with that fine Yankee accent. Here, now, let’s see what I can do. I’ve a plaster in my bag, if you want it.”
Tears spilled over the lad’s cheeks, but only because he crushed his eyes into an uncertain squint. “A plaster?”
“A Band-Aid, you’d call it. Here now.” Cat leaned the spear against a wall and pushed around in her purse until she found the plaster. She held it up, then grabbed his fingertip, squeezing it hard. The boy yelped again as his fingertip turned dark red, so startled he hardly even noticed when she yanked the splinter out. Blood welled up and his eyes got rounder. She nodded and wrapped the plaster around his finger, then gave it a kiss. “There, my lad, all fixed.” All she needed was the spell that Auntie Sheila had known, the one to heal the hurt. Then realization struck her and she gave his fingertip a last squeeze before setting the magic she’d known all her life: “Now it’s a magic plaster, so it is, my boy. Don’t take it off for three days, and the wound will be healed when you do.”
His eyes widened and he nodded eagerly, then ran away again, crowing to his ma about the plaster. That was it, then, she thought: this was the life of a mage. Band-Aids and bog-men.
It sounded like a fine life indeed.
Twenty Years After
“Twenty Years After” takes place twenty years after the Walker Papers end, and contains nothing the author considers to be significantly spoileriffic.
The coolest woman I’d ever known taught me that magic was real.
I don’t think she meant to. No, I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but she did it anyway.
I was six when she healed me of sickness brought on by dehydration. My Mom remembers it, but she thinks it was just a lucky chance that a police officer happened by with water and a soothing touch. Me, I remember the cool rush of strength that poured in me. It was like a drink of water in the desert—and I hiked the Mojave last autumn, so I have some idea of what that really feels like—except it didn’t just soothe my throat or wet my mouth. It did line my esophagus the way a cold drink does, all the way to my belly, where it spread out nice and cool, but cold water stops there. You don’t feel it wash through the rest of you, still cool and refreshing as it runs through your blood. I felt the magic through my whole body, tingling and bright and comforting. When I’m having a bad day I can still call that feeling up, the way it made my fingertips and toes buzz, and even now, twenty years after, it makes me feel better.
Then on my seventh birthday, Joanne Walker and I went down a rabbit hole in a police station and played Tar Baby with Brer Rabbit. I told her that day I was going to grow up just like her, a police officer and full of magic. Things didn’t work out quite how I planned. I did four years in the military instead of becoming a cop, and it took twenty years of trying and hoping and practicing before I accepted the truth: I’m not magic.
But I’m smart.
The Yakima River started up in Cascades, fed by Keechelus Lake. It was a major tributary for southeastern Washington, providing irrigation water for the orchards, grapes and crop fields, as well as being a year-round fishing and kayaking river. The valley it fed had range lands that were used by the military for training grounds. I’d spent a few months there during my time in the Army, so it was familiar territory, but more important, it was just about in my back yard. But then, a lot of the Pacific Northwest was: I ranged down to Salem and as far north as Whistler. I’d gone out to Coeur d’Alene a few times, too, but anything big enough to draw me farther away was in Joanne’s weight class, not mine.
I headed down through Snoqualmie Pass on the scent of a rumor. That was how most things worth hunting came my way: rumors or small independent news sources. The major media had nearly collapsed under the weight of microreporting, but they’d never carried news stories about this kind of thing anyway. Boiling lakes only made the news if a scientist could explain why it was boiling. When there was no obvious cause, the news outlets shut up and pretended it wasn’t happening. Most people were like that too, which I’d never even wanted to understand. As far as I was concerned, a world with active magic in it was a far better place to live than one that had none. No doubt Joanne had had a significant effect on me, but she’d had an effect on the whole Northwest, too. There was flat-out more magic now than there’d been when I was a kid, and people tried harder than ever not to see it. I didn’t get it.
Keechelus Lake, held in place by Keechelus Dam, was a simmering froth. Steam billowed skyward, killing trees and sending birds to other nesting sites. No insects droned in the air and there wasn’t a hint of sulfur scent or anything else that might account for boiling lakes. There was a faint scent of boiled fish. Just as well they’d dammed up Keechelus, not Kachess, one of the other lakes that fed the Yakima. Keechelus meant few fish in the indigenous Yakama language. That was one of a million bits of almost-useless information I’d picked up while studying anthropology and world mythologies after I got out of the military. Almost useless, but not entirely. Not if you’d chosen to hunt monsters for a living. Well, not exactly a living: it wasn’t like anybody paid me to keep the world safe from things that went bump. I was a grad student in Spokane, halfway done with a degree in world mythologies. I taught two classes a semester, kept my ear to the ground for monster reports, and worked on my dissertation when I had no other option.
Where water was allowed to spill through to the river, it hissed and bubbled. I left the dam and drove downstream, taking Highway 10 and then Canyon Road, which ran closer to the river’s route than the interstates did, and watched to see where the water cooled.
It didn’t. All the way south, through Ellensburg and into the city of Yakima, where I turned around and headed north again. If the river boiled for ninety miles out of the headwaters, it probably boiled all the way down to the Columbia. I stopped for lunch at a diner perched on the river’s edge. It was almost deserted, windows steamy and the whole place smelling heavily of fry grease.
My waitress, the only one working besides the cook, looked wrung-out and flat. I or
dered two vanilla milkshakes to go with my chicken breast salad, and gave her one of them when she brought them to me. She gave it a sad smile, then went ahead and sat down with me. “Not like there’s anybody else waiting on their order today.”
“Yeah, I almost thought you were closed when I pulled up. Nobody in the parking lot. How long has this been going on?”
“Two or three days.” Her name tag said Marnie. Marnie was in her thirties and trim in the way women who worked on their feet and didn’t snack on too many french fries could be. She looked like a nice person. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, making almost no difference to the damp sheen there. “This is the first time in years we haven’t been swamped at lunchtime. Good thing, too, because the pipes are drying up. We won’t even be able to do dishes soon.”
“Drying up, really? I wonder if the water’s boiling out of them.”
“They’re not hot, just dry. I don’t know why. We’ve had a couple geologists in, but they just wipe steam off the windows and frown at the river. They won’t answer any questions. It’s like it’s creeping even them out. I mean, shouldn’t there be news reporters down here? Big ones, I mean, not just the locals and the crazies.” Her expression went guarded. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“Local, or crazy?” I smiled to take the edge off, and sipped my milkshake. There was real vanilla in it, which surprised me. “Neither. Not a news reporter, not a crazy. I bet the crazies say there’s other strange things going on too, though. Because it never rains but it pours, right?”
Marnie shivered. “I wouldn’t care if the crazies were saying things. That’s what they do. But some of my friends say their kids, I mean good kids, not trouble-makers, you know? That they’ve seen some crazy things up in the mountains just the last few days. I mean, they’ve gone out looking, of course, who could stop them with the river all boiling up like that? And they come home saying they’ve seen—” She stood up abruptly, almost knocking her milkshake over. “You are a reporter, aren’t you? And you’re going to make me look like one of the crazies. You’ve got a camera on you somewhere, don’t you? One of those micro ones you can put in earrings or hair clips.” She looked at me suspiciously, but I hadn’t put earrings in, and my chin-length blond hair was simply tucked behind my ears.
“Not even in my rings.” I lifted my hands to show her how they were bare of jewelry, too. “Honestly, the only camera I’ve got is my phone, and that’s in the car. I was just going to go hiking until I saw the river, and I wondered if it was even safe out there anymore.” I edged a foot out from beneath the table to show her my hiking boots. “If kids have been out there hiking it’s probably safe, huh?”
Marnie sat down again, still wary. “I don’t know. They said there were…landslides.”
“Landslides” was an obvious euphemism. I wondered what for as I made a show of letting my shoulders slump. “Aw. All the heat and steam making a mess of the underlying soil, you think? Maybe I can find someplace rockier—”
Marnie said, “No,” sharply, then curled her lip. “I mean, maybe, but they said—they were up pretty high, where the treeline stopped on that snub-faced mountain, so there wasn’t much soil. Rock slides, not landslides, I guess. I just don’t think anybody should be out there.”
“You’re probably right.” I finished my salad and had another sip of milkshake. “That’s the best vanilla shake I’ve ever had.”
That restored her ease and earned me a smile. “It’s our specialty. We’ve got customers who drive out from Spokane and Olympia once or twice a month for a Sunday brunch with milkshakes.” Her smile faded as she looked toward the steamy windows. “They’re not going to keep coming if the river keeps boiling. I don’t know what I’ll do if this place closes. There aren’t a lot of jobs out here.”
“I’m sure it’ll settle down. These things do.” Another customer came in as I spoke. Marnie gave me another smile, grateful if disbelieving, and got up to say, “Sit anywhere,” and offer menus. I put a twenty down on the table and left. She would think it was over-tipping of the finest degree, but to my mind, I was paying for information as well as the meal. I knew more—a little more—than I had when I’d sat down, and that was worth a lot.
In the car I pulled up a web interface and put in a search for boiling rivers, dry pipes, rock slides and supernatural origins. An unsurprisingly short list came back to me. I opened the most-likely looking pages onto the windshield and scanned them, thinking that Joanne would have skipped this step. She could afford to rush in where angels feared to tread, though. All I had was combat training and silver bullets. I’d never met anything that specifically had to die by silver, but I hadn’t met much that wouldn’t. Better safe than sorry.
Most of the search hits were a miss. The one that looked most promising also looked the least promising, as in “Don’t be stupid, Ash: call Joanne in on this one,” least-promising. Demons and godlings were out of my league. I double-checked the data from the normal channels against the undernet sites most often used by adepts like Joanne and reapers like me, and didn’t come up with anything better. Either I was on the money, or the thing I was chasing was so obscure not even the connected world-wide efforts of scholars, demon hunters, and magic-users could had a database entry for it.
I cleared the windshield and muttered, “Joanne’s mobile,” to the car, which phoned her as I pulled out of the diner’s parking lot. Her phone went to voice mail, which made me check the time. No, I wasn’t calling at a bad hour, she just wasn’t picking up. Fair enough. “Hey, Jo, this is Ash. I’m heading for Keechelus Lake and maybe a Sumerian demon. If you’re not busy this afternoon I could probably use your help. The river’s boiling and the mythology says a god killed this demon back in the day. Give me a call if you can make it.” I hung up, drove back toward the lake, and pulled off the road where the bushes along the roadside were densest.
It wasn’t dense enough, to my eyes. I backtracked to fluff grass up where I’d stepped on it, and to drag deadfall into more of a blockade, but I still thought the car stood out like a sore thumb. That was potentially a huge problem. This far out of town I had to worry about State Troopers, and they were the leos with the millimeter wave scanners that a lead box in the trunk couldn’t trick. But there was road and there was mountainside. Not much choice in the matter. Not for the first time, I regretted driving an older vehicle: my Cadillac was three times as long as the newest electric cars. I could have buried one of those in the roadside bush without a problem.
But new cars minimal trunk space, and unlike Jo, I couldn’t afford to go into battle with nothing more than my charm and good looks. She had a magic sword, for Pete’s sake.
I had a grenade launcher.
I wasn’t supposed to, of course. Nobody was, especially since the country-wide crackdown after the election riots when I was seventeen. That was part of why I’d gone into the Army instead of becoming a cop—it had become clear there would be advantages to having friends who worked in military supplies. As a result, the trunk of my Caddy looked like I was preparing for the zombie apocalypse, though from what I understood, zombies were extremely difficult to raise and that threat was negligible. My arsenal was meant for other, more likely scenarios, and the grenade launcher was the least of it.
Most of the grenades I carried were flash-bangs, not frags, but I had lethal capability if I needed it. I also had stun guns, pistols, knives, a garrote, and a slingshot. I’d been surprised at how loud a gun with a silencer was, the first time I shot one. Movies lied. So I’d learned how to use the slingshot for when silence really mattered, and if I thought I would be doing range-hunting, sometimes I took the compound bow out of the trunk too.
Not today, though. I packed grenades, flash-bang and frag alike. I took my space blanket, in case I was out too late and needed warmth. The brand name was something else, but the common name had stuck through the decades, even though a modern space blanket was nothing like the sheet-of-Mylar old ones. Mine didn’t
just trap body heat. It absorbed and re-focused solar power, and could be set to release warmth either slowly or quickly. I folded it over my backpack so it would gather heat while I hiked, then slipped my phone’s tiny flat-panel subwoofers into the pack’s outside pockets, muttering, “In case I’m out too late and need a party in my pocket to keep me going.” It sounded like something Joanne would say, which pleased me. I strapped knives to both thighs, slid the stun guns and one pistol into the backpack along with the frags, and shouldered the pack on before sliding my Glock into the custom holster built into the pack’s straps. I put a water bottle on my hip and shook my shoulders, a slosh inside the backpack assuring me the second bottle inside the pack was full, tucked snacks into pockets, and went hiking.
Asag. Sumerian demon of sickness, who, according to my undernet search, made rivers boil with his ugliness and had sex with mountains to make rock-demons to protect himself with. Rock demons and landslides had enough in common to make the link, especially with Marnie’s discomfort about what the kids had reported seeing. The boiling water was a clue, too, even if I couldn’t imagine what a Sumerian demon was doing in the Pacific Northwest. There’d been no reports of unusual sickness in the area, but it was possible he brought sickness, rather than followed it. With boiling rivers and drying-up wells, it was easy enough to see how sickness could come in his wake.